IEEE802.16e is a broadband wireless access standard established by the IEEE standard organization. Compared with IEEE802.16-2004, IEEE802.16e is added with many methods, such as switching and power saving mechanism, to support the mobility of mobile stations (MS).
Idle mode is a very important power saving mechanism in 802.16e system. In order to support the paging of the mobile stations in idle mode, the standard offers the definition of paging area. A plurality of base stations (BSs) are assigned as a paging area, and overlapping among paging areas is allowable. Several paging areas are administrated by a paging controller (PC). As shown in FIG. 1, the base stations BS0 and BS1 belong to paging group A, the base stations BS1 and BS2 to paging group B; the paging controller PC0 controls paging group A while the paging controller PC1 controls paging group B; and the PCs connect with location register (LR) to save the relevant information of the mobile station. Referring to FIG. 1, PC0 connects with the location register LR0, while PC1 with the location register LR1.
When MS is in idle mode, the PC can send paging message to initiate a paging process in the following conditions:
1. there is data in application layer being sent to a mobile station in idle mode;
2. the network side actively requests the mobile station in idle mode to update its position.
In the above conditions, all the base stations in the paging group to which the mobile station belongs will send MOB-PAG-ADV message. According to the instruction in the MOB-PAG-ADV message, the mobile station takes corresponding action.
Since all the base stations in the paging group to which the mobile station belongs will send MOB-PAG-ADV message while the mobile station can only respond to one of the base stations, the other base stations which have not received the response will continue paging broadcasting. Thus, the technical problem in this process to be solved is how to terminate the unnecessary paging broadcasting as soon as possible and to reduce the occupation of the wireless resources, while to ensure the MOB-PAG-ADV message to be received by the mobile station as far as possible. The Network Working Group (NWG) in WiMAX organization offers the basic flow of paging and defines the fields of paging starting and ending in the message. However, there is a limitation in the flow, i.e., it does not define how to use paging termination mechanism in all kinds of conditions.
Therefore, an optimized procedure and method about how to use the paging termination mechanism in paging process to reduce the occupation of resources, especially the wireless resources, are required by the industry.